Baptists: We Are Statesmen

The nation's largest Negro church is the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc. Its 5,000,000 members are fond of fervent gospel songs and sin-damning sermons, and show little interest in merging with more staid and sober white Baptist groups. Their kind of leader is the Rev. Joseph Harrison Jackson, the grandfatherly ecclesiastical politician who last week in Detroit was overwhelmingly elected to his twelfth consecutive term as National Baptist president.

Mississippi-born Dr. Jackson was first elected to the presidency shortly after the National Baptists had amended their constitution to limit tenure of the presidency to four one-year terms. In 1957, there...